Facebook Is Telling Brands About Their Ad’s Relevancy

Facebook is offering advertisers a new powerful tool to improve their ad’s relevance to compete in a highly competitive, expensive, and scarce social network ad slots.

Facebook will tell advertisers how relevant their ads were through the relevancy score. The score will be displayed to advertisers so that they can adjust their less relevant ads to become more relevant, thus reducing price and enhancing performance. The ad’s relevance will be judged on a scale from 1 to 10 — with 10 being the most relevant — to its target audience.

How Facebook will measure relevancy

The ad relevance will be measured through different variables, including but not limited to, video views, shares, clicks, number of times people hide the ad or report it as spam. This audience based response will help Facebook to score an ad’s relevance after it has been displayed 500 times and will update the relevance score as more users come across it.

Facebook may value one variable over another while scoring an ad’s relevance based on its objective. For example, if an ad is created to push app downloads, then the scoring method will prioritize measurements like click-to-install rates when judging its relevance. It is important to note that ads bought with Facebook’s promise of delivering a set number of impressions won’t be affected.

Why is Facebook doing this?

Facebook took this measure to improve the quality of posts people see in their newsfeeds. Last year Facebook further inched towards a pay-to-play model for brands to communicate with people on Facebook, thus making more room in people’s newsfeeds for posts from friends and family. However, it is important to note that things are heating up on both sides, whether it is about freely taking up space in people’s feeds or paying to get an ad spot.

For the last two years, Facebook has significantly increased its price for displaying an ad while selling fewer ads. According to a post, “Facebook served 65% less ads than a year earlier, but the average cost of those ads to advertisers was 335% higher.”

However, Facebook does not want to show awful, irrelevant ads to its audience. That will force people to ignore ads and will eventually alienate its audience. The least people would do is ignore ads, and in the worst case scenario, people may leave Facebook for a better option, like they did with MySpace. That is why Facebook is becoming more transparent with advertisers about its relevance score and why it matters.

Moreover, an ad’s relevance score may play a vital role in the ad’s price. When Facebook’s ad-delivery system tries to decide about which ads to show to people, it weighs advertiser’s bid and ad’s relevance score. A high relevance score could compensate for a low bid, and it could be the difference in making a choice between two advertisers willing to pay comparable prices to reach the same audience.

Wrap Up

The relevance score will have a great effect on advertisers wanting people to do something like click on the ad to navigate away from Facebook to a brand’s site or to install an app. Advertisers targeting attention over interaction may see a smaller impact on cost and delivery.